Preemptive retransmission: improving the performance of short-lived TCP connections
Alex J. Tarr, Bogdan Ghita · 2007
This paper presents a method of improving the perfor-mance of TCP (Transfer Command Protocol) based short-lived connections, such as web transfers. The character-istics (throughput and round trip time) experienced while communicating to a selection of Internet sites were exam-ined, revealing that path constancy can be observed over extended periods of time. The research identified a tempo-ral correlation between the three-way handshake and sub-sequent measurements of the RTT; by using this correla-tion, the algorithm is able to detect the signs of a packet loss and retransmit the affected segment before a standard implementation of TCP is able to recover the lost segment. Following the proposal of the algorithm, simulations were performed to study the performance of the proposed algo-rithm. In summary, during these simulations it was found that use of the Preemptive Retransmission algorithm pro-vided enhanced performance, with the average duration of a connection 8 % shorter than when compared to TCP Reno.